Video 15:31
Palmer's party

Clive Palmer, mining billionaire and leader of the Palmer United Party discusses his business dealings, his political party and ambitions.

Transcript

TONY JONES: Joining me is the lead of the Palmer United Party, Clive Palmer, thanks for being there.

CLIVE PALMER: Hello Tony, good to hear from you.

TONY JONES: Now after 'The Australian's investigations of your finances and that extraordinary press conference yesterday, are you starting to regret your decision to run for public office?

CLIVE PALMER: I love it, Tony. We've got 118 candidates standing across Australia, we're going to have 150 at the election and the people of Australia are going to get a choice. They won't just find someone governing the country by default. They will have a choice to make a difference for a change.

TONY JONES: We haven't seen you under that kind of pressure and scrutiny since you entered-

CLIVE PALMER: No pressure at all.

TONY JONES: The political arena. Did you expect to face that kind of scrutiny over your finance s?

CLIVE PALMER: I think to put it in context, the particular journalist had asked five or six questions about why finances which I am happy to answer but he didn't let other journalists ask question about our policies. I have always said if we stand for a party they won't attack us on our policies or ideas, governments may come and go but ideas go on forever, they'll attack me or the person or some reasons, totally baseless claims. All of my companies are privately owned by me. I'm 100 per cent shareholder. There are no loans to any banks or anyone. The only loans are to me. No-one has control but me. There is no other interest but me.

TONY JONES: Essentially in the press conference you accused the newspaper of having a political motive because of your perceived electoral threat to Tony Abbott. What is the evidence of that?

CLIVE PALMER: It started out f you like, 'The Australian' saying that our party was like the Katter party and marginalising us to a large extent but as we went across the country we got more and more candidates and of course there are more online polls showing, for example, Warren truss's seed in Wide Bay, the online polls showed our candidate at 51 per cent and Warren at 26. He's supposed to be the alternative Prime Minister. It became clear there are forces in this country who want to support one particular party for PM and didn't want us to interfere with that. We've got particularly baseless articles in 'The Australian'. It's to be expected.

TONY JONES: These journalists are just doing their job, scrutinising a candidate and if you look at what you have said yourself, you've opened yourself up to this kind of scrutiny...

CLIVE PALMER: don't mind.

TONY JONES: You agree then, that it's ok to ask those kinds of questions because you've claimed your business success is one of the reasons you should be trusted to run the national economy?

CLIVE PALMER: I think I've got a better track record than some of the people that are there. After all you don't have to be too good to be better than someone who's only had a job for six months or someone that's only been a lawyer. You really don't have to have too good a qualifications. I mean the top six Ministers in the Gillard Government have had 181 years of work experience and only 13 in the private sector. Only two of those have been - if you take out the time of unionists and lawyers it's only been for two years. People with two years experience in private industry are running a $1.5 trillion economy. I think I can qualify for something better than that and that's the reality of it.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to this reporting, the newspaper's reporting is backed by leaked documents which you say were stolen in a break-in to your offices some time ago. You're not claiming some kind of Watergate style conspiracy are you?

CLIVE PALMER: Who knows, Tony. All I know is those documents were stolen and so was the computer they were on and they may not have been stolen by 'The Australian', I'm not alleging that, but somehow the information came into possession of 'The Australian' and they never contacted me. The letter they talked about was a letter I think dated 13th of March and there was a particular instance where we were owed over $500 million and the court case we were saying to the judge "this money was needed to invest in our businesses" And when that money wasn't available to us because later on the court - part of the case went to the Supreme Court in Western Australia where we got the judgment, I decided to provide my personal money to the plant to keep operating and to keep everyone employed up there and that was my decision and really, that's my business. And I want to support the people in Townsville. We've got a great plan, they've responded very well. We now produce nickel at well under $7, the best in the world. And they've done a great job and I want to support them. That's what it boils down to, it's got nothing to do with anyone else but us and my employees and me sticking with them. Of course no-one wants to concentrate on what our policies are. Tony Gillard or Julia Abbott haven't attacked us on one thing at all.

TONY JONES: When you first announced - we went through some of your policy those now I think it's legitimate that we cover some of this.

CLIVE PALMER: Sure.

TONY JONES: Apart from anything else, you've threatened legal action against 'The Australian' and its journalists. Are you going to take the kind of Gina Rinehart style action to attack the journalists specifically to find out what their sources were?

CLIVE PALMER: I think it's a matter of great regret that people published things that are biased and untrue just to sell newspapers, if you like, or for whatever other reason.

TONY JONES: But those - if I may say so, those documents are not biased and untrue, they're written by you.

CLIVE PALMER: No well they're taken out of context and without interviews or responses and that's not a reasonable and balanced view. And of course if that sort of unfounded allegation upsets the livelihoods of a thousand people and families, they need to be held accountable for what they do. After all, in journalism we need to verify our story for two or three stories. I'm sure you do that on your program because you've got a professional standard second to none in the country, Tony.

TONY JONES: Well lets go to some of the things Hedley Thomas, 'The Australian's reporter, has said he's raised questions over the financial viability of two of your key companies, the nickel refinery in Townsville is one of them and of course your resort hotel in Coolum. Are they both making big losses as is claimed?

CLIVE PALMER: No, they're on track at the moment with the investment we've got, that I'm putting in of my money and the results are better than projected. If you take the resort at Coolum, when we took it over it had a total of $509 million of losses since it opened and the owner was going to close it down and cut it up for real estate. We stepped in, restructured it, we had to change some jobs and let some people go and put some other people on, and now it's operating and in the case of Ubulu, it's well known BHP was going to close the plant four years ago. It's not been closed, it's operating tonight producing nickel and there was no question of anyone losing their job or anything like that, it's just a beat-up. But if you take 'The Australian' and the 'Courier-Mail' with News Limited, you find their editor was sacked last week. There's been a bloodbath and people have been lost. You'll find 'The Australian's costs exceed its revenue. And it's totally without any sort of profit. But they don't report that. Those people have actually lost their jobs, journalists have been sacked across the country and none of the media report it. No-one's been sacked from me and there's no plan to do so.

TONY JONES: The Queensland Premier Campbell Newman's bought into this. He says he's worried about the 1,000 jobs at the nickel refinery, calling to, to be fully accountable in terms of your finances and I know you're making an announcement in Townsville on Monday, are you actually going to guarantee the future of that refinery and the one thousand jobs that are there?

CLIVE PALMER: All the people there know who I am. They know I gave away 55 Mercedes Benz to their workers three years ago, shouted everyone at the plant, 1500 people a holiday to Fiji, they know I've increased their bonuses when it was appropriate. They've got confidence in me, and what I say to them will be a matter for me and them. They'll hear it first from me face to face. I think it will be good news and we're very happy with what's going on there.

TONY JONES: So can I confirm you're going to keep the refinery going and not sack people who are working there?

CLIVE PALMER: There's no plan to make any major changes. Of course under BHP there was a 30 per cent turn-over rate of staff, about 300 people turned over from the 1,000 employees and now ours is well below the industry average and brought that down. That continues to happen in a major organisation like that. There's no plans to change it there's plans to expand it and that's what we'll be doing.

TONY JONES: There are growing questions about whether you really have access to the cash to bail out the refinery which evidently is losing a great deal of money.

CLIVE PALMER: Hold on Tony, that's just not true. We're not bailing out anybody. We have no debt. We have assets of over $800 million in Queensland Nickel.

TONY JONES: The refinery is losing money, isn't it?

CLIVE PALMER: If you lose 20 million and you've got a billion it doesn't bother you, because in all the businesses we're in constant development, we're developing new things and new products and bringing in new technology which costs us money. We're doing it because we think it's in our interests. So it's just a ludicrous - these poor journalists who don't know what they're saying and quote unnamed sources, and because people is - some irate employee is difficult, they do. But they're doing it for a political reason, really to push our opponents which they don't want to acknowledge that for the first time in our history, men and women of Australia are going to make a difference on September 14 and vote for us. Under the corporations' law we have to public accounts, we have to sign a solvency statement and they're independently auditors. Auditors who are registered separate from us and have got the obligation to look at the accounts and give an opinion. If they give an unqualified opinion, which means everything's OK, there's nothing to fear. They've given those opinions. They've signed the accounts.

TONY JONES: You claimed at yesterday's press conference if there was a financial problem you could take from your personal resources $100 or $200 million and pump it straight into the company. Do you really have those sorts of cash resources at hand?

CLIVE PALMER: I never said 100 or 200 million, that's hearsay; I said if I put money in every month...

TONY JONES: No you did actually said you could just pump in 100 or 200 million.

CLIVE PALMER: As I said, Tony, that particular company has no debt. It's got $800 million worth of assets, got insured replacement value of $4.5 billion. We're hardly worried about what Hedley said and where he's losing money at 'The Australian' and people are being actually sacked and gone, there's a lot of misery among journalists in this country who are now finding themselves as PR consultants writing on the Internet who used to work for 'The Australian' and the 'Courier-Mail'. So, on one hand he's saying this about us and not looking at his own company and his future.

TONY JONES: You were asked yesterday if you would release your company accounts to the public before the Federal election and you said, "I'll give them my cheque book and they see how much money I've got in the bank." Do you really intend t to do that?

CLIVE PALMER: If that's required. But we don't want to react to people like 'The Australian'.

TONY JONES: No but this is what you said you'd do, so I'm just wondering if you were joking.

CLIVE PALMER: I was having fun at them but to be quite frank with you, the election issues are much more important. I don't matter anymore. I'm irrelevant to policy. What's important is the Australian people get the right changes. We know Gillard and Abbott are more of the same. This a diversion by 'The Australian' because they don't want to face up with the issues and they want to support Tony Abbott to be the next Prime Minister and we know there's long history of 'The Australian' doing that. We know they supported Kevin Rudd in 2007 against John Howard, we know they supported other Prime Ministers, Gough Whitlam in 1972 but everyone was too frightened to say it. If they picked on me I'm not too frightened to say it.

TONY JONES: Well I mean it is true that very wealthy people in parliament, Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd, for example, they're not asked to open up their cheque books but one of the problems here is some of the things you say. In Melbourne last Sunday, you said you're getting $500 million a year in the Pilbara iron ore royalties from your Chinese partners. The very next day a spokesman for Civic Pacific told 'The Australian' that's not true and so everyone is asking whether you told a lie when you said you were getting that money.

CLIVE PALMER: Of course that was an unnamed spokesman and all these people are unnamed people and they won't put their name to it. I've got independent advice from our lawyers that we're entitled to over $500 million in relation to our civic matter, it's been a public issue and we've already had the Supreme Court of Western Australia deliver a judgment in our favour which was scathing on Civic and there were two other cases pending in the Supreme Court which I can't comment in detail which I'd like to be able to do, but they should be finalised before Christmas. I'm quite happy with the receivables that are there that we're entitled to, based on their advice. And I'm quite happy to support the people in Townsville, the men and women who are entitled to have an income, who are working hard and I'm happy with, because I own 100 per cent of the business. The business has no debt and it really has no liability. And it's not politic Paul Barry, for example, who did the investigation on Alan Bond which was a public company and had lot of debt, billions of dollars of debt from banks. None of that applies to me so this is the beat-up of the century, and designed to stop the Australian people knowing what the real issues are in this election, for example the National Disability Insurance Scheme only applies to people who have a disability under 65. When you're 66 you have a disability, you don't get any coverage and 75 per cent of all disabilities for Australians have been over the age of 65.

TONY JONES: OK, we are out of time but you are about to announce another round of candidates in NSW in particular and have you got any star candidates you can announce tonight?

CLIVE PALMER: We have. Tomorrow we'll be announcing the leader of our Senate team in NSW, Matt Adamson, who's a former great Rugby League player who played for Penrith in 1991, and it will be announced at the Penrith Leagues Club. And of course he played State of Origin for NSW and Matt will be leading our Senate ticket there. We're confident he he'll stick it up them like Dougie Hawkins says in Melbourne, Teddy Whitman said many years ago. We've got a great candidate there and other great candidates to announce. Our full ticket in NSW is nearly full, as it is in Queensland and Victoria. Today we announced a Senate candidate in Western Australia and we announced an endorsement for the seat of Fremantle so right across this country, men and women are coming to the fore and saying enough's enough. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are the same and we want to change.

TONY JONES: Very briefly, we are running out of time but you said you were going to have candidates in every seat. It looks like you're on target to do that. It is a massive operation. How are you funding it? Is that out of your own pocket as well?

CLIVE PALMER: That's out of the money I haven't got Tony, it's out of love. Love of the Australian people, because we're funding part of it but people are writing in and giving us money and joining the party, and we've got thousands of people across Australia. And we've got people from all other political parties. A former senior vice president of the Liberal Party is working hard with us, as is the former senior vice president of the National Party because we want people to have representative Government in this country and we want to make a difference. So you'll see on election night our party makes a contribution and I'll see you for an interview in The Lodge just after that.

TONY JONES: Clive Palmer, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for joining us.